Snakes on a Plane slithers into public consciousness

The film Snakes on a Plane is not likely to earn any Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay.

Its plot involves a mafia witness who is flying from Hawaii to California to testify in a criminal trial. To knock him off, a hitman places a crate of vipers on the flight, and somewhere over the Pacific, mayhem ensues.


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But Snakes on a Plane may one day merit a case study at the Harvard Business School. The film, produced by Time Warner's New Line Cinema, represents one of the most dramatic examples of the internet's ability to transform the way that Hollywood makes and markets films.

A year ago, the project was virtually unknown, apart from the fact that actor Samuel L. Jackson had signed on to play the leading role. Today, more than two weeks before it opens, it has emerged as one of the most talked-about films of the summer.

The remarkable thing is that such a buzz has been generated not with an expensive television advertising campaign - Hollywood's traditional method - but organically through the internet.

"It's a phenomenon," said Russell Schwartz, president of domestic marketing at New Line, noting that the film had turned up more than 6m results on a recent Google search.

"We've got great audience awareness, and we're still two weeks out."

If the Snakes on a Planephenomenon can be tracked back to a particular moment, it would be the day last August when Josh Friedman, a screenwriter called in to doctor the script, mentioned it on his blog.

"It's the everlasting gobstopper of movie titles," Mr Friedman gushed.

Such zaniness apparently piqued the interest of other film bloggers. They weighed in, and soon Snakes on a Plane was spreading around the web like a virus.

Fans began posting their own video spoofs on YouTube, a community site featuring user-generated content. So popular has Snakes on a Plane become that "SoaP" has now joined the instant-messaging patois with a meaning roughly akin to "whatever" or "stuff happens".

At first, New Line executives puzzled over what to do. They were losing control of the film's marketing campaign before it had even been launched.

Their in-house lawyers were up in arms because the studio's copyrights had been violated as people cut and pasted footage from early shoots onto their websites. Eventually, however, they decided to go with the flow.

"We realized pretty early on that the best thing we could do was to let the fans own this movie," Mr Schwartz said.

New Line has done that to an extraordinary degree. The studio would occasionally further stoke the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon by leaking more material onto the web.

The film's director, David Ellis, even decided to re-shoot a few scenes in order to respond to online demands for more sex, violence and profanity. "We are taking a bit of a leap of faith here," Mr Schwartz said.

Seven years ago, The Blair Witch Project awakened Hollywood to the internet's possibilities as a promotional tool. Since then, it has become an essential part of film marketing campaigns - particularly for studios trying to reach a young, male audience.

While the internet has the potential to make Hollywood marketing more efficient, studio executives say its impact has not been uniformly positive.

In the old days, for example, they could edit trailers to make a drama seem more like a comedy, or vice versa, depending on audience tastes. These sleights-of-hand helped preserve at least a decent opening weekend for many mediocre films.

But those days are gone as the internet has allowed fans to share inside information and spout opinions about productions months before they open. "You can't cheat a film any more," one studio marketer lamented.

Tim Hanlon, senior vice-president at Denuo, a media futures consultancy within Publicis Group, believes Snakes on a Plane represents a broader dilemma for marketing executives in the internet era.

They are enthralled by the possibility of a cheap marketing campaign that becomes a sensation, with consumers using the internet to rave about a product and recommend it to others.

But they have to balance that possibility against a worrisome loss of control.

"It's a double-edge sword," Mr Hanlon said. "Marketers see what's going on and they would love to break through and be part of the phenomenon. But they cannot descend into anarchy."

For Mr Schwartz and New Line, the question is whether all the people blogging about the film will put down their laptops and pay money to see it in a theatre.

Regardless, he believes that the spontaneous, grassroots nature of the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon means it would be disastrous for a studio to try to re-engineer it for other films.

"These kinds of things are never by design," Mr Schwartz said. "Whatever the result, it will never be replicated. Thank God."